For a few months, I’d been seeing mutterings on my Twitter feed about a Beekeeper’s Quilt. People seemed really into it, but I never bothered reading further because I don’t really quilt. Time passed, and I started seeing people going on about hexipuffs. That made even less sense, but I was busy, so I let that go, too. It wasn’t until I saw probably half a dozen tweets over half a day–some that mentioned both the Beekeeper’s Quilt and hexipuffs in the same breath–that I decided to google it. (Does anyone else still trip out over the fact that google is a verb?)

That was my first mistake. I should have known that if everyone was talking about it ad everyone was making it, starting to ask questions meant I was walking on a slippery slope. I didn’t think about that, though, and was instantly enchanted by the idea. Its really very simple: you knit approximately eleven million 3″ hexagons in the round, and then you stuff them with polyfill. Once you’ve knit all eleven million, you tie them together into a warm, squishy, puffy quilt.

I didn’t really see any way I wasn’t going to start one, but I figured if I sat quietly on my hands for awhile (or worked on the test knit I’m supposed to be making) I would forget about it, or get distracted by something more interesting.

That was my second mistake, because there is possibly nothing in the world more delightful and interesting than hexipuffs.

My third mistake was tweeting about how resistance was probably futile because when I woke up the next morning, a friend had sent me the pattern as a gift and it was waiting in my Ravelry account. I pretended to be virtuous and waited until that evening to give this hexipuff business a try. I knit half the hexigon and decided it was close enough to gauge, then knit the rest. For a minute or two, I contemplated not stuffing it, but part of the appeal of the blanket was its fluff factor. I dug the polyfill out of the closet (What? You don’t have a random bag of polyfill sitting around your closet?), stuffed the hexipuff and bound it off. All told, it took maybe a half hour.

I held it up, squeezed it a little bit, examined it from a few different angles, smooshed it some more, and totally began to understand the noise that Stephanie made in her vlog about the project. Squishing hexipuffs makes it really, really easy to want to make that sound.

And then I reached for the closest ball of sock yarn and cast on another. I knew I was in real trouble when, at the end of the night, I had four hexipuffs and a little pouch to store the project in.

I think I’m up to about a dozen now, and its really, really hard to want to knit anything else. I mean, what’s not to like. You get to revisit the stash of partial skeins of sock yarn and play with all sorts of different colors. A half hour, and you have a finished project, and when its cast off? You get to squoosh it. And here’s the thing about hexipuffs, the thing that possibly makes them the most dangerous: they get exponentially cuter the more there are.

I haven’t tried it with circulars, so I’m afraid I can’t help you there! For me, the DPNs are perfect because they’re just the right length. I think a circular would wind up feeling like it was in my way. If you want to tell me where you’re getting hung up with DPNs, I can try to help.